


see you at the festival

by vulpespluvia



Category: Free!
Genre: Horror, Occult, Paranormal, Slice of Life, well kinda
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-29 14:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulpespluvia/pseuds/vulpespluvia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which fate is not kind to Chigusa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i.

It’s been two weeks. The hallway feels smaller, narrower than it did this time, last year, but the walk from the art clubroom to Chigusa’s homeroom feels like an uphill march. It used to be a dash, a gauntlet of jostled elbows and blithe, over-the-shoulder apologies, chased by a second pair of legs, falling quickly behind, and its owner’s wheezy complaints. Now, her feet pull ahead in measured strides, arms inert, eyes focused somewhere between the ceiling and the bodies moving through the hall.

“Senpai?”

It’s been two weeks and her peers haven’t yet perfected the art of pretending she isn’t there. There’s no doubt in her mind that she is the one being addressed, because there has been a noticeable bubble of hushed space, probably two meters or so in diameter, that has followed her through any public area on school grounds since the beginning of the school year.

Sure enough, there’s a girl standing, shoulders squared in her direction, from only a few feet at her two o’clock, and every passing nanosecond spells fresh regret across her face for catching her attention in the first place. Another girl, presumably her friend, drags her feet from side to side in the background.

Chigusa levels a stare at the first girl.

The first year winces. “Your hands…”

She turns her palm slowly, as though she were maneuvering an unfamiliar tool and not the appendages tapering from the end of her wrist. It’s covered in red broken by occasionally intersecting white lines. Her fingers curl down, red on red, pads tugging at the skin. The red crumbles beneath her nails and tumbles down the slope of her wrist. Charcoal.

She forgot to wash her hands.

Her heels click bluntly, the tongues of pedantic aunts, against the floor all the way to the girls’ lavatory. She can already feel the whispers rolling along the hallway, the rumors that will draw themselves up in a wave and come crashing down on her back once she exits the restroom.

_Hanamura tried to kill someone. Hanamura tried to kill herself. Gross. Are you for real? At school? Shut up, there she is._

Water splashes over her palms, then soap; the charcoal runs sticky, resisting the friction of her small fingers. Red foam circles the drain. _Cherry-flavoured_ , she thinks. She lowers her hands into the sink, cupping them together beneath the charcoaled water. Lifts.

The sound of the door opening is almost identical to the ensuing gasp, and it makes Chigusa look up. Her wrists go slack, and short, wet plops pepper her disbelief.

 _You cut your hair_ , she almost says. It’s the first thing she notices about her best friend. Former, as in: not her best friend anymore. She almost slaps herself right then, with wet hands. It would hurt. She deserves it.

Did she really think that just because their homerooms had changed she wouldn’t ever run into her _classmate_ at _school?_ _You’re a dumbass_ , she tells herself. _That is definitely what you are._ And then she goes back to washing her hands, because this can’t happen, right now or ever.

“I called you,” Gou blurts out—not snaps, not yells—flat out _blurts_. “A lot! And then I stopped calling, because I thought it was maybe insensitive of me, probably, because you probably needed some time alone, and…and,” she falters mid-sentence as she shuffles to the nearest stall, “this is just going to take a minute, so don’t leave, okay?” She doesn’t even lock the door.

Chigusa’s hands are clean. She leaves the faucet running as she hastily dries her hands her skirt, glancing at the one occupied stall. Gou used to make her turn the water on every time, since primary school, even though she told the redhead over and over again that it’s a huge waste of water and, besides, she could still hear her peeing. They must have sent hundreds of gallons per school year literally down the drain.

The inane nostalgia of shared bathroom rituals clouds her judgment for a moment, makes her careless. Her head swivels back around to the sink, and in that fraction of a second she catches the eye of her reflection in the mirror. And it’s only in that second, but it’s too late. She’s already seen the narrowed eyes, the stretched, upturned corners of her mouth, lips splitting apart, teeth in a smile she knows she isn’t wearing on her own face. _I see you_. Something dry and wrinkled and very much like skin brushes against the back of her right hand.

The drain gurgles behind her as she runs out of the restroom.


	2. ii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Chigusa doesn't get it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah, i uh don't edit these. no quality here, ok?

Chigusa’s grandmother told her that they would come for two things—her voice and her eyes.

"That’s creepy," she would say and then giggle, because how else do you react to those words? Coming from the little old lady who puts candied pansies in her tea and collects lamps shaped like woodland animals, how do you take that sort of talk seriously? She didn’t.

She laughed at the sachets of herbs and other strange amulets she found in her schoolbag, under her pillow, in her underwear drawer between the bras. She nodded off during lectures with her boobs smelling like a witch doctor’s pantry. Some nights, she woke up, salt rolling down her neck from a nightmare she could never remember, and her grandmother’s cool, dry hand would be there on her brow, murmured prayers nudging away the darkness. In the late afternoons, she came home to smoky threads of sandalwood and cloves from the incense burning on her nightstand.

She never gave a second thought to those fixed details in her life; they were just odd habits, quirks she fondly associated with her grandmother.

The belt hits the floor with a leaden clunk not a moment after she opens the door of the art clubroom. Chigusa stares at the belt as it disappears under a heap of brown fabric. Her eyes travel up the ankle bones and along long, lean calves that stand in the center of the rumpled pile, flickering over the electric indigo lines that race down a black pair of jammers. By the time she reaches the fingers that have paused in their task of unbuttoning their owner’s shirt, she has identified the interloper as third year Nanase Haruka. One of Gou’s swimmer boys.

Haruka’s head is turned in her direction and she meets his unconcerned gaze—he doesn’t appear to recognize her in the slightest—before noticing the large glass tank on the ground in front of him; it’s been filled to the brim. _What?_

She returns her attention to the upperclassman’s face as he continues to regard her coolly, and she realizes with a flash of incredulity that, yes, he is about to step into that tank of water, and, no, her presence does not affect those plans in the slightest. So she ignores him and makes a beeline for the cluster of canvases propped up against the shaded corner of the room.

There is an ongoing war in this very room, between Chigusa and the art club, whose president insisted that she either join and pay the dues or skedaddle. Her response was to come to school earlier than she knew any of the club members would wake up—artists are a sickly sort, she quickly discovered—and use their supplies anyway.

She is working on her fourth piece, a companion to its predecessors. Harsh, thick lines cut across the canvas, shaded in black and edged with smudges of gray, just enough dimension for an observer to distinguish the dark zigzags as buildings. The sky is missing in the unfinished picture, and she besets the empty space with the same glaring red and orange that stretches over the backdrop of the first three drawings.

Water sloshes quietly in the tank. “Those pictures are awful.”

“Thanks.”

Chigusa frowns. It takes her a moment and a crackling sensation at the back of her throat to realize that the brittle voice, cobwebbed with sarcasm and injured pride, is her own. She whips her head around in alarm.

Art supplies. Fish tank. Water. Nanase. Nothing entirely out of the ordinary.

“I’m serious,” he says seriously, his clear gaze either disregarding or not noticing her consternation as it meanders over the charcoal lines, the red sky. “They’re really terrible.”

She bites the inside of her cheek and looks back to her unfinished drawing. The first time she saw that place was during the last week of her first year, about a month ago. The class rep was making some announcement that didn’t concern at least half the class, and she was doodling anthropomorphic sunflowers on a note she and Gou were passing back and forth, so she wasn’t quite sure when her eyelids dropped.

Then she was standing in an elevator that was counting up, but instead of numbers there were chicken scratch symbols lit up above the doors, and as she started trying to make sense of them— _ding_ —the doors slid open. She squinted against the burning sunset. Wasn’t it only around two in the afternoon? The sky looked like blood over an amber glass, and staring at it she felt like a frozen pulse, a paralyzed heart straining to catch its next beat. And as intense as the color was, she couldn’t locate the sun or any clouds for miles. She didn’t know where she was—no, she was on the fourth floor, of course she was.

Looking out over the balcony that stretched in both directions, before the elevator, her eyes fell on the city below and collided with the opaque blackness. It made her want to throw up, the stillness. _I can’t hear the cars_ , she realized. She couldn’t even see the streets. The buildings looked charred, and they just stretched up endlessly, a field of coffins pushing at the heavens. She just kept looking at the buildings, her foot hovering at the threshold of the elevator.

She couldn’t remember waking up, or what she and Gou talked about on the way home before they parted ways, but she felt the gate of her grandmother’s house, solid against her palm as she walked inside.

Her grandmother was in her chair in the living room, holding a teacup in her lap. It lay on its side, the gold-plated rim gleaming in the late afternoon sun. The front of her skirt was damp and sprinkled with flowers petals, purple and yellow and white, and crusty with sugar. It was the first time Chigusa had ever seen a dead body.

She smooths the charcoal over the canvas, distributing the brick color in a thin, patchy layer. Her voice and her eyes, how is she supposed to solve that kind of riddle? _You should have been more specific, grandmother._

Chigusa glances over her shoulder at Nanase. The tank is empty. Clothes vanished. A string of little puddles glides along the floor and out the open door. Her fingertips have gone numb against the rough canvas.

She can’t remember waking up.


	3. iii.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which curiosity kills.

The tank is a specially engineered vat filled with a translucent fluid that he must immerse himself in daily in order to keep his human form from liquefying, revealing the gray-fleshed cetacean underneath.

Chigusa tucks that away in the nook of her thoughts labeled ‘speculations about the tank,’ and begins to construct another leaden building. The tank has crawled under her skin with its glass edges like an itch she hasn’t been able to scratch for days. Surely there are better things to focus on, like say, matters of life and death. Just small things. She always was more concerned with the finer details of Gou’s involvement with the swim club than a final exam scheduled for the next day. That wasn’t so long ago. She darts a glance at Nanase. Not much has changed since then it seems.

So, where did the tank come from? Did Nanase come with it, like a tiny taciturn Kal-El in his pod jettisoned to earth from a doomed Krypton? Did he secretly have super strength and laser beam vision, or would he one day rise from the shallows of his tank, smash it to pieces, and come after her with a long, jagged shard dripping in his hand?

These wildly idiotic hypotheses have shattered the reverie that enshrouded her mind when she set to work at the canvas; a near dream state gradually receded to the horizon of her consciousness with every _plip_ of water. It makes her feel absurd, wallowing here in her cocktail world of grief and creeping horror, as a classmate on the cusp of adulthood splashes around not ten feet from her in what is basically a giant fishbowl with corners.

Her only reassurance is that he isn’t going to ask her about Gou or the rumors; he’s just not that kind of guy.

Nanase always arrives before her, always sits in the tank for maybe half an hour before silently plodding off to the locker room or class. Who knows.

She wonders if his fingertips have taken on the permanent countenance of raisins from all the moisture he saturates himself in. She herself avoids water as much as humanly and hygienically possible, anything that can hold a reflection. This was a lesson learned at her grandmother’s funeral.

At first she thought it was the salt flooding her vision or the light filtering unevenly through clouds heavy with impending precipitation that played tricks on her eyes. She’d spent much of the ceremony, as well as the days leading up to it, directing an unfocused stare in whichever direction her face was tilted—concerned, familiar faces, the retreating backs of those same individuals, a stranger’s crotch on the bus, which got weird and uncomfortable fast.

Fortunately she was programmed with autopilot formalities, and this included seeing guests off after the ceremony, as they got in their cars, one by one, and drove back to their homes and lives where her grandmother’s absence was as relevant as mowed grass. She didn’t recognize which distant relative or acquaintance it was who clasped her hands emotionally before crouching into their dusty black car, but she bowed her head as they said their goodbyes through the driver’s side window and started the engine. Her head came up as the window rolled shut, and for the first time since she’d found her grandmother’s body, her eyes fixed on the tinted surface. She fainted not a moment later.

At first she thought the bloody, warped face was her own, and that she was looking at an apparition of her own forthcoming death—that sort of thing can totally happen to people who find dead bodies, right—then she realized the face was not hers at all. Somehow this wasn’t comforting in the least.

It started happening everywhere she went, and that no one else in the vicinity appeared to notice that every shop window, mirror, and cell phone screen reflected her as a leering older woman with blood gushing from every orifice, had to mean that either she was certifiable, or she was neck deep in some supernatural shit. Because it happened really just about _everywhere_ , except in fact for her grandmother’s house. Her house now, according to the attorney.

With this dawning comprehension came a current of details clicking into place—years of incense and amulets and prayers. Deft fingers brushing over her forehead, weaving heather into her hair. _They will come for your voice and your eyes._

So, she burns the incense, lines her pockets with herbs and rocks, makes up prayers of her own. She sits in her grandmother’s chair, tries to divine what the hell the old woman was thinking, leaving her to deal with this on her own.

During the fourth week of the semester, seven drawings completed, she scratches.

“I can’t read that,” Nanase says flatly.

Everyone says that about Chigusa’s handwriting. She rolls her eyes and scoots forward, holding up her notebook on which she has written, “What’s with the tank,” with five question marks because it felt necessary.

He squints at the notebook with disinterest, but reaches for it with wet fingers. She really should have seen it coming, but neither one of them moves quickly enough to stop her notes from slipping out of Nanase’s hand and into the tank with a _plop_.

Her hand plunges into the water before she can consider how awkward this is, but that is a month of dutifully jotted class notes between the half-naked upperclassman’s legs, and although she can’t decipher them herself and the notes are probably ruined anyway, it’s the principal of the matter. A second later she is staring aghast at the soggy, _definitely_ ruined notebook. She turns to Nanase, who looks a touch too unconcerned for her to tolerate.

He shrugs. “Just ask Gou for her notes.”

“ _We’re not even in the same class anymore, don’t you know anything?!_ ”

That’s her second outburst, and she can sense a third brewing in her throat and behind her eyes. This is her replacement. This log in a tank.

She feels obligated to do something incredibly irrational, like smack Nanase in the face with what’s left of her notebook, or shout some more in his general direction, or hunt down Gou and shout at her instead. She deflates with a noisy sigh. In a minute she will drag her feet back to her corner of the art clubroom and return to her ‘terrible’ creations…just as soon as she’s sure that all the violent impulses have worked their way out of her system. Her eyes narrow to beryl slivers at the older boy, who has submerged himself in water. _I could drown him. I could do it right now and no one would ever know, and I would have this room to myself in the mornings like I used to. I’m going to die a horrible death and probably have my soul plucked from the blossom of youth and be dragged down to hell anyw—what if he has secret gills?_

Footfalls break across her murderous plotting—“Haru-chan? Hey, I know you’re in here, I heard splashing”—the door slides open.

Chigusa and third year Tachibana Makoto blink at each other over the threshold. Behind her, Nanase surfaces in the tank. She sighs again, feeling somewhat thwarted. Getting away with two consecutive murders just doesn’t sound as feasible.


	4. iv.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Fate is a dick.

Her first thought is that it’s incredibly unoriginal.

Chigusa sits slumped at her desk with a fresh ice pack pressed to her head. The votes are in and the rep has announced what role their class will play in the upcoming school festival—a café. _At least it’s not a play or something that’ll take a lot of work_. The noise level crawls higher as her classmates discuss what kind of café they’d like to put together, and she lets it fade to a buzz as her mind drifts elsewhere. No one will bother her with an obvious head injury, not that she’s exactly dragged into class matters on a regular basis anymore.

The space between her brows pinches irritably as she recalls that morning.

Nanase’s head broke the surface of the water, and he blinked up at the doorway. There was a lot of blinking all around in those couple of seconds; it was one of those scenarios that short circuit your brain because everything is too weird to process. All you can do is snap your eyes open and shut like a camera shutter attempting to get on film what you will try and make sense of later.

“What are you doing here?” he said bluntly.

Tachibana Makoto had the longsuffering look of someone who is all too familiar with these situations. “Shouldn’t that be my line?” he chided, grassy eyes drinking in the nonsense before him. “Does the art club know that you’re using their clubroom as a bathhouse?”

Hearing the words spoken aloud congealed her earlier conclusion that her weirdness quota for the morning has been met to excess. Alarms went off for her to make scarce.

Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. Fate was a great fan of obstacles, and she liked to put them in everyone’s way; a puddle of water suited her just fine. It put Chigusa flat on the floor, headfirst.

When she came to she almost wished she hadn’t. Consciousness greeted her with the sound of Tachibana lecturing his teammate about the hazards of leaving puddles of water lying around unmopped, sounding for all the world like an anxious young mother with a small child who doesn’t like to clean up his toys. She absently noted that his voice goes almost shrill when he got worked up.

She sat up, drawing the boys’ attention—well, Nanase didn’t pay much attention to anything—and wondered how much time had passed.

“Ah, Hanamura, it’s only been a few minutes,” Tachibana supplied helpfully. “How are you feeling? Does your head hurt? There was a loud crack when you hit the ground, but the nurse said you’d be fine. But does it hurt? It was really loud. You’ll be fine! But it was so loud.”

That’s when she recognized the walls and furnishings of the school infirmary, and the cot that she was reclining on. Her head did hurt, like there was a hand inside her skull, squeezing her brain like a stress ball, and she could hear the blood rushing in her ears any time she moved.

Tachibana was apologizing profusely for Nanase, who had taken advantage of his distraction for a silent exit, and would she please not report this to anyone, because “Haru-chan” might get in trouble. “Haru-chan, you apologize to Hanamura, too—Haru-chan…?” He realized his friend had escaped, and his tall frame shuddered with a sigh as he looked at Chigusa with resignation. “I’ll get you some ice for your head.” He retreated to the other side of the curtain.

Well. This was not ideal. She didn’t feel up to a quick exit like Nanase had taken, and she couldn’t tell Tachibana to go away, so she settled for gingerly leaning back on the lumpy pillow. Maybe she could use this as an excuse to hide out in the infirmary for the rest of the day.

The curtain rustled as he reappeared with a plastic Ziploc stuffed with ice. “The nurse said you should be okay to go to class.” He caught the look on her face. “Or we can pretend I didn’t just tell you that.”

Chigusa said nothing, but she took the ice. The initial contact with the raised bump on her head made her wince.

He observed this with apprehension and sat down on the cot parallel to hers. “I know I’m probably one of the last people you want to hear this from,” he began quietly, “but Gou has been worried about you. I am, too.”

She closed her eyes. The cold seeped into her head.

“I don’t think…this isn’t just about your grandmother. Am I right?”

She laced her fingers over her stomach, a living wake.

He apologized again, but didn’t leave or speak again. She didn’t open her eyes and her breathing was even, but she could tell he knew she hadn’t fallen asleep. It was only after the bell rang that she heard the other mattress squeak and the curtain whisper.

Her name is being called.

“You’re like artsy or something, right?” Noguchi, the class rep, says. “You can be on the costume committee.”

It’s not like she has to be a server or anything, so she nods. What was the theme? She thinks she heard something about Venice and pantomime, but it couldn’t be anything that stupid.

It is.

“Mimes are comical and garish and _not_ beautiful.”

The costume committee consists of a whopping two members: Chigusa and Ryuugazaki Rei. And although Hazuki Nagisa has been conscripted as a server, he insists on tagging along to Rei’s house, which has been elected as their workshop. She can hear Fate tittering away in the distance, that hag.

Lost in contemplation over how to speed along this project with the added wrench of her no speaking rule, she realizes her classmate is addressing her.

“I heard your notebook was ruined this morning,” Rei says, handing her a stack of papers held together with a paper clip. “I made a copy of my notes if you need them.”

This time it’s not an accident or outrage, but guilt instead that pushes a small “thank you” out of her throat. Not too surprisingly, nothing jumps out of a swirling portal from hell to grab her, but she feels uncomfortable now, as though she were going to sleep in a house in a seedy neighborhood with her front door wide open. Rei gawks at her, as if hearing her voice for the first time, though it’s certainly been long enough to count. Nagisa is too busy bounding up and down the hallway like a puppy and was out of earshot.

Rei’s offering reminds her that she left her waterlogged notebook in the clubroom, and she should go retrieve it before the art club decides to cast dark magic on it or something. Who knows what those paint slathered freaks are into.

She holds up a finger, indicating that she’ll only be a minute and Rei and Nagisa should wait here, before rushing off.

On the way to the clubroom she flips through the notes. They look totally different from the notes she had—she can read his notes, for one thing. He jotted down in the margins questions he suspects the teacher will put on upcoming exams. Nerd.

The tank is gone. So is her notebook.

She suspects this is Tachibana’s doing. It doesn’t really matter, since she was going to toss it out anyway, but she shakes her head at the empty space in the center of the room. _There you go, deciding things when no one asked_. It occurs to her that he was probably the one who carried her to the nurse’s office.

Something snags on her peripheral vision as she reaches for the door handle. The corner of the room where she works is shadowed; even with the lights out half the room is bathed in the waning light of late afternoon, but she can barely make out the outline of her canvases on the floor. Her eyes examine the darkness and a frown tugs at her mouth as she notices another object on the floor. Two objects. Someone must have left their own artwork next to hers. She cranes her neck forward; they could be vases. Do they even have a kiln on campus? The bases are the most visible and she recognizes the familiar shape. Toes.

Her gaze travels up the pale, veiny feet, slowly climbing the ankles to calves. It dawns that the outlines are larger than she first perceived them to be. She stops at the knees, and tells herself to leave. Withered thighs. Get out of here, Hanamura. Fingertips.

Then she is in the hall, looking up at the door she doesn’t remember slamming shut, but the bang rings in her ears. The skin on her knees burn from skidding on the tiles. She grabs her left arm, where she felt the unmistakable pressure of hands shoving her roughly. In the next moment she is on her feet, running and sobbing. Her eyes are wide and dry and all she can see is her grandmother’s house, which is miles away and with nowhere safe in between.


End file.
